On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 04:52:33AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
wiki pedista wrote:
I was thinking about a printed wikipedia.
I would bet $5 that this will never happen.
You're on. :-)
I think wikipedista's suggestion has some merit, and most of the discussion about it has centered on technical questions (i.e. separate database table versus in-the-article versus...)
On the other hand, I think that when someone gets ready to make a print version, the amount of labor required to list all the articles and go through reversing the titles for some is pretty small, especially as compared to the total labor required to 'filter/edit' the entries to eliminate useless stubs and so on.
So I conclude, tenatively, that this aspect of what we are doing doesn't pose much of a barrier to a paper encyclopedia, and that the added complexity is *probably* not worth it *right at the moment*.
Now, if there arises a community desire and effort for us (the wikipedia community) to produce a paper version (rather than leaving it up to some future 'RedHat'-style redistributor), then we'll want to add a simple means for lots of people to jump in and lend a hand with whatever is needed.
My opinion is that it's very unlikely someone will ever produce paper version of full Wikipedia, but it's likely that someone will put major part of Wikipedia (for example, everything related to chemistry or discrete math) to paper quite soon (this year that is).